Diversity challenges from urban West Africa: How Senegalese family deaths illuminate dominant understandings of ‘bereavement’

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with Senegalese people living in four contemporary urban neighbourhoods, who had experienced the death of an adult family member, we explore how the research challenged and surprised the White, British members of the research team. Such challenges help to shed light on some dominant, taken-for-granted understandings of ‘bereavement’ based in ‘Western’ perspectives. The surprises include how the death was discussed and explained; patterns of family living and the implications for how individuals responded to the death; the emotional significance of particular religious expectations; and the emotional implications of material hardships. After exploring how interviewees responded to the deaths in Senegal, we consider how these responses compare with expectations and taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘bereavement’ in the contemporary UK. We conclude by discussing the implications for bereavement support and professional practice, in relation to diverse responses to death.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• bereavement
• diversity
• cross-cultural
• Africa
• materiality

ORCID

Jane Ribbens McCarthy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-⁣2827-7453

Ruth Evans http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4599-5270

Sophie Bowlby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8333-3606

Notes

1 We acknowledge the great debt we owe to Joséphine Wouango, researcher and interviewer, and Fatou Kebé, interpreter and interviewer, without whom this research would not have been possible.

2 The term ‘culture’ risks conveying a monolithic and unchanging stereotype. Rather, ‘culture’ is highly dynamic, fluid, and inter-sectional, capturing a fleeting sense of particular patterns and ways of life. Nevertheless, if we don’t pay attention to these divergent patterns, we render them invisible, as Baggini points out.

3 Since the term ‘bereavement’ does not translate directly into all languages (Evans et al 2017a), we prefer Klass’s (1999) alternative concept of ‘responses to death’.

4 Ruth, the principal investigator, had previously worked in Senegal, but Jane and Sophie had not previously conducted research in Africa. Some of the ‘surprises’ were thus more notable to Jane and Sophie than to Ruth.

5 The notion of ‘the West’, is problematic, risking designating the rest of the world as a residual category of ‘non-Western’. We use this term here for brevity, but with this caveat.

6 The terms minority and majority worlds have become widely used in cross-cultural work, signifying that the majority of the world’s peoples live in economically poor regions while a minority of the global population live in affluent societies in the ‘global North’ or ‘West’.

7 This is not to underestimate important contributions from some qualitative studies of culturally variable responses to death, e.g. Japanese research underpinning new Western theories of continuing bonds eg Klass and Steffen (2018).

8 Among Muslim families, none of the deceased made formal wills.

9 Indicative evidence for this brief sketch includes: Breen & O’Connor, 2007, 2011; Jakoby, 2012; Ribbens McCarthy, 2006; Shapiro, 1996; Stroebe, 2010; Thompson et al 2016; Valentine, 2008; Walter, 1996, 2017; Wambach, 1986.

10 Although there is some provision for family based bereavement therapy based on family systems theory in the US, this is not widespared in the UK.

11 Indicating how inequalities may not be recognised by those on the privileged side of such social dynamics, while being all too apparent to those on the oppressive side .

12 These questions are primarily based on our Senegal research findings, but also reflect some insights from Shapiro (1996, 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Ribbens McCarthy

Ruth Evans

Sophie Bowlby